Originally Posted by
bkafrick
SYR is my home airport.
What seems infuriating to me, after listening to the ATC feeds, is that our own tower originally told the cockpit to proceed over to the deicing pad where it would be met by rescue. It wasnt until after the First Officer asked if rescue had any way to get inside the plane, that the Syracuse tower then told them to proceed to gate 6 and that rescue would meet them there.
You would think that the SYR tower would know its own capabilities for rescue to board a plane for a medical emergency? Am I crazy?
This should not surprise you if you're a SYR regular and follow the airport operations. It's run by a bunch of people who have no idea what they are doing. They spent $50M on an expansion only to reduce the overall throughput of security to some of the longest lines I've seen in the country during peak hours for the general passenger queue... and reduce the amount of breakfast food options for morning flights. Then they blocked the central design feature of the place with two ugly kiosks. That's a multimillion dollar view they botched! I mean at least it looks nicer that it once did, but they really botched a lot of key things they could have done. They know how to plow the snow, but they don't know how to de-ice efficiently. They spent $2.5M and had a huge mess and hassle with the garage the last year and now they want to knock it down. And they gave Delta $500K in incentives to re-add service to MSP just for them to do a switcharoo and reduce the number of overall flights and seats into the market by dropping CVG altogether, JFK and ATL frequency.
In short these people are ill advised and refuse to listen to frequent travelers when you reach out to them. I suggested a frequent traveler advisory board. They seem to not get a lot of things and honestly I don't think these people actually travel much and see how other airports work.
Every now and then they do something good, the new Middle Ages brew pub looks great but now we don't have a sit down place for breakfast. We either need a change in leadership, or perhaps leadership to listen to the people who use the airport and have also seen how hundreds of airports work or don't work and give them ideas.
Botching a rescue attempt doesn't surprise me in the least.